Posted
by
Roblimo
on Monday January 27, 2014 @12:35PM
from the next-year-maybe-we'll-have-4-dimensional-printing dept.

3-D printing is far from new, but a $499 3-D printer is new enough to get a bunch of people to write about it, including someone whose headline read, CES 2014: Could 3D printing change the world? XYZPrinting, the company behind the da Vinci 1.0 printer, has some happy-looking executives in the wake of CES. They won an award, and their booth got lots of attention. This is what trade shows are all about for small and/or new companies. Now the XYZprinting people can go home and pump out some product -- assuming they got a lot of orders (and not just attention) at CES.

Timothy:Gary,
could you go ahead and introduce yourself please?

Gary:Okay.
Thanks Timothy. It is a very nice to have this opportunity to
introduce Da Vinci 1.0 from XYZprinting. I think the key point that I
want to talk about this printer is not just its amazing price which
we offer to the market at $499, but also the printer features itself.
We have no less, any less features than most of the current
benchmarking products in the market. We have a larger build size, we
have superb quality.

Timothy:How
big is that build size?

Gary:It
is 7.8 inch x 7.8 inch x 7.8 inch. So it is a fairly large build
size. Also, if you can find the quality, it is also superb. But the
most important is I think to bring up two points. One is the ease of
use, the easy user interface. We try to manipulate the typical 2-D
printers, the laser printers, plug and play kind of thing, you don’t
have to do any kind of assembly or complicated setup for the printer,
so just plug in USB cable, you can press print and do 3-D printing.
On the other hand, there are lots of safety features for home users.
So we try to put the entire package into an enclosure, so you don’t
get burnt you don’t get into any kind of difficulties from the
printing operations. So safety is one of our biggest concerns for the
typical consumers. So again, to bring the price down, and we can do
it better than anyone else, and then also, we have a nice quality
ease of use and safety features for the product itself.

Timothy:Talk
about the filament that you use.

Gary:Yes.
It is a typical ABS filament, and also later on we will have PLA in a
couple of months’ time.It is like cassette loading,
very easy loading. So you buy the filaments from us, it is USD 28 for
a 600 gm pack.

Timothy:Now
the build platform here, is that motorized?

Gary:Yes
it is.

Timothy:Is
it heated?

Gary:Yes
it is heated.Actually two main heating elements, one is
the print head or the nozzle, another one is the print bed, so just
to try to make the print quality well.So the heated bed
is actually one of the features for us to make sure the quality is
outstanding.

Timothy:What
sort of files does it work with?

Gary:Standard
STL files, you can grab from our own website or from any lots of
database websites you can get, and also we have our own dedicated
proprietary file formats you can transfer from a standard STL file to
our proprietary formats. For printing files from files for
proprietary formats, you can reserve or you can save to some
dedicated configuration in order to get an optimized printer outcome.

Timothy:Can
you show me how does data actually get into the printer here? It is
an USB port or do you have SD slot?

Gary:Okay,
from computer. So we have a lot of software all you need to have is a
standard STL file downloaded from the web, and then just open the
file from using our softwares and there are some easy
configurations_____14:42and
you just press print button.

Timothy:So
it is a USB connection?

Gary:That’s
right. Through a computer.

Timothy:Can
we see the back?

Gary:Sorry?

Timothy:Can
we see the back of the machine?

Gary:The
back of the machine? Well, actually another cool thing is there is
nothing at the back. Because the entire operation is within the
enclosure. So the filament installation is inside the machine itself.
So it is very easy to use. You might see the printer size is not that
small but because we have a higher enclosure inside the machine, so
the entire movement is inside the machine during operations. So
that’s why the printer size looks a little bit big, but in
terms of the operation size we are not bigger than anyone else.

Timothy:Now
what about availability? Is it shipping right now?

Gary:Okay,
it will be available in about a month and a half’s time, it
should be available somewhere by the beginning of March.

Timothy:And
is that worldwide?

Gary:Well,
some parts of the world it is already available such as Taiwan and
China. But for US market, we will available, people will be able to
get the product on online channels from early March.